Another Ayn Rand disaster

[LMNO]

Levitt got taken on as a Consultant by Lampert, loved his ideas etc...

The freakonomics video had a section on abortion, race and crime and I recall a lot of shit flying around about how badly the data was interpreted. It basically came down to "There's less crime in X decade compared to Y because less black kids."

It was pretty much that blunt too. Will see what I can dig out, bear with me.

It essentially made a correlation between abortion and crime rates.  The theory being that if (black) women are forced to birth and raise children they either don't want or can't properly care for, the children are at a higher risk for turning to crime.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Levitt got taken on as a Consultant by Lampert, loved his ideas etc...

The freakonomics video had a section on abortion, race and crime and I recall a lot of shit flying around about how badly the data was interpreted. It basically came down to "There's less crime in X decade compared to Y because less black kids."

It was pretty much that blunt too. Will see what I can dig out, bear with me.

I read the book, that's not what it said. Saw the video too, it also didn't say that.

Levitt, among others, was hired as a consultant by Lampert... it seems a bit of a stretch to hold him responsible for Lampert's insane business model.

[Junkenstein]

I mean, fuck:

In 1999, Levitt presented a paper for privatizing prison labor at a symposium hosted by a private prison consulting firm, arguing: "I would privatize prison industry. As long as the government is in charge of prison industries, it will be difficult if not impossible to avoid decisions being made with political rather than economic justifications." Thirteen years later, Levitt's privatized-prison-labor dream is a reality: Some 1 million state inmates are slaving away for wages averaging between $0.93  and $4.73 a day. African-Americans make up over 40% of the U.S. prison population.

In 1995, Levitt published a paper which "proved" that packing prisoners into increasingly-overcrowded prison cells translates into a net $15,000 positive effect on society per overcrowded cell inmate.

http://exiledonline.com/s-h-a-m-e-profile-freakonomics-author-steven-levitt-is-an-anti-labor-pro-prison-milton-friedman-extremist/

There's tons of this shit. He's a player in the prison pipeline and the media fellates him for his free market "wisdom"

[Junkenstein]

Levitt got taken on as a Consultant by Lampert, loved his ideas etc...

The freakonomics video had a section on abortion, race and crime and I recall a lot of shit flying around about how badly the data was interpreted. It basically came down to "There's less crime in X decade compared to Y because less black kids."

It was pretty much that blunt too. Will see what I can dig out, bear with me.

I read the book, that's not what it said. Saw the video too, it also didn't say that.

Levitt, among others, was hired as a consultant by Lampert... it seems a bit of a stretch to hold him responsible for Lampert's insane business model.

I'm not holding him responsible, I'm just pointing out that he won't have helped matters in any regard.

"I almost always believe in free markets as the solution to problems"

—Freakonomics Blog; January 23, 2012

"Any religion . . . has its heretics, and global warming is no exception."

—From a section in SuperFreakonomics "that debunked" global warming science

It's been a while since I've seen the video, what did it say on race/abortion? I can't recall right now, been years since I last saw it.

ETA -

"Fertility declines [due to legalized abortion] for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared with 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions. Under the assumption that those black and white births eliminated by legalized abortion would have experienced the average criminal propensities of their respective races, then the predicted reduction in homicide is 8.9 percent."

—From a 2001 paper arguing that an increase in abortions among black women in the 1970s was the reason for lower crime rates in the 1990s

[Left]

Damn, so much for the Craftsman tool warranty...

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Ah, here we go:
http://exiledonline.com/s-h-a-m-e-profile-freakonomics-author-steven-levitt-is-an-anti-labor-pro-prison-milton-friedman-extremist/

Steven Levitt, University of Chicago economist, gained nationwide fame and prestige after co-authoring Freakonomics, a pop economics book based partly on Levitt's original economic research. Published in 2005, Freakonomics became an instant #1 bestseller and spawned an entire Freakonomics media franchise that included a branded Freakonomics blog (hosted on the New York Times website until 2011), a regular segment on the National Public Radio program Marketplace, a Freakonomics movie and, alas, a Freakonomics business consulting company (now called the Greatest Good).

In 2006, Time magazine solidified Levitt's "thought leader" status by naming him one of "100 People Who Shape Our World."* But despite Levitt's high profile, very little has been written about his academic and ideological background. Generally Levitt is assumed to be a harmless, quirky pop economist for trivia nerds. But is that really the case?

As Steven Levitt's S.H.A.M.E. Profile demonstrates, Levitt is a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago School neoliberal who believes in the sanctity of "the market" and a small government whose function is restricted mostly to protecting property rights. He has used "objective" economic research and mainstream credibility as cover, while attacking teachers' unions, advocating for the privatization of prison labor, spreading crude climate denialism and promoting rank "free market" ideology that sees human labor as a resource to be extracted for maximum profit. Levitt has also developed a nasty habit of misrepresenting the research of other scientists in order to reach predefined ideological conclusions, and has failed to disclose financial conflicts of interest.

I smelt bullshit on this guy years ago but only got confirmation fairly recently. I think I may have had Cain to thank for that, I can't quite recall.

But yeah, Everytime I see this guy's name mentioned in a positive light it sickens me a little.

That is a very interesting spin on the book... I can't say I agree with it, but it's an interesting spin. I'm not defending Levitt because I don't know any more about him than what I learned from reading Freakonomics, but something about Levine's allegations raises a red flag for me about the nature of his intentions. It just feels a little personal-feudy to me.

[Cramulus]

I watched the freakonomics documentary on Netflix a while back. I recall him linking increased abortion rates to decreased arrest rates 20 years down the line. I don't recall him saying that arrests decreased because less black kids had been born -- his explanation was along the line that unwanted children tend to have troubled home lives and get into crime. If that was code for black kids, it went over my head.

I can see how that has troubling implications. I wouldn't necessarily chalk it up to racism. But disclaimer - I haven't read the book and I am fuzzy on the documentary.


He's an economist, so his opinions come through a financial filter. I wouldn't trust that economical models are also moral, so it doesn't surprise me that his conclusions are somewhat ethically skeevy. He's right that packing prisoners into cells saves money. That doesn't make it the correct thing to do by any means. But I don't think that necessarily makes him racist either.

[Cain]

Ah, here we go:
http://exiledonline.com/s-h-a-m-e-profile-freakonomics-author-steven-levitt-is-an-anti-labor-pro-prison-milton-friedman-extremist/

Steven Levitt, University of Chicago economist, gained nationwide fame and prestige after co-authoring Freakonomics, a pop economics book based partly on Levitt's original economic research. Published in 2005, Freakonomics became an instant #1 bestseller and spawned an entire Freakonomics media franchise that included a branded Freakonomics blog (hosted on the New York Times website until 2011), a regular segment on the National Public Radio program Marketplace, a Freakonomics movie and, alas, a Freakonomics business consulting company (now called the Greatest Good).

In 2006, Time magazine solidified Levitt's "thought leader" status by naming him one of "100 People Who Shape Our World."* But despite Levitt's high profile, very little has been written about his academic and ideological background. Generally Levitt is assumed to be a harmless, quirky pop economist for trivia nerds. But is that really the case?

As Steven Levitt's S.H.A.M.E. Profile demonstrates, Levitt is a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago School neoliberal who believes in the sanctity of "the market" and a small government whose function is restricted mostly to protecting property rights. He has used "objective" economic research and mainstream credibility as cover, while attacking teachers' unions, advocating for the privatization of prison labor, spreading crude climate denialism and promoting rank "free market" ideology that sees human labor as a resource to be extracted for maximum profit. Levitt has also developed a nasty habit of misrepresenting the research of other scientists in order to reach predefined ideological conclusions, and has failed to disclose financial conflicts of interest.

I smelt bullshit on this guy years ago but only got confirmation fairly recently. I think I may have had Cain to thank for that, I can't quite recall.

But yeah, Everytime I see this guy's name mentioned in a positive light it sickens me a little.

That is a very interesting spin on the book... I can't say I agree with it, but it's an interesting spin. I'm not defending Levitt because I don't know any more about him than what I learned from reading Freakonomics, but something about Levine's allegations raises a red flag for me about the nature of his intentions. It just feels a little personal-feudy to me.

That's how the eXile crew likes to roll.  AFAIK, the eXile and Levitt have no personal feuds going on...Yasha was a journalist in Russia when Levitt first wrote Freakonomics.

It's probably worth reading this to get an idea of the ideological background of Levitt:

Specifically, Levitt has worked with Chicago's notorious union-buster Arne Duncan, who was the CEO of Chicago public schools until Obama tapped Duncan to be the U.S. Education Secretary in 2008. Duncan has been credited with doing more than anyone else to help bring the neoliberal nightmare to Chicago's impoverished and mostly nonwhite public schools, funneling public funds to dysfunctional private voucher schools, terrorizing unionized teachers, closing schools and turning public education into feeder tube for the prison-industrial complex. And Levitt, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago, was right there along with Duncan.

Levitt, together with other University of Chicago economists, was given access to the city's public school system and turned it into a neoliberal R&D lab for high-tech union-busting.

And, of course, it is always worth remembering the institutional links between the Chicago School of Economics, American libertarianism and kooky experiments in economics performed in Third World dictatorships like Chile.

[Junkenstein]

And, of course, it is always worth remembering the institutional links between the Chicago School of Economics, American libertarianism and kooky experiments in economics performed in Third World dictatorships like Chile.

I'd forgotten about those bouts of Milton madness. I expect some of the shinier new theories will be being tested in various middle eastern countries over the next couple of decades too.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The statistics make sense, and have held up to scrutiny, if to a lesser proportion than originally projected. Impoverished and disadvantaged people are more likely to become involved in street crime. The fact that a greater proportion of the black population is impoverished and disadvantaged is not news. That this, in pure statistical terms, translates to a higher proportion of black people, particularly young black men, engaging in crime, is not palatable, but it is, nonetheless, true. This also means that if all impoverished and disadvantaged women have access to abortion, a higher proportion of black women, compared to the total black female population, will have abortions, than white women as a proportion of the white female population. However, because in total there are still many times more impoverished and disadvantaged white women than black women, the majority of the reduction in crime could be attributed to white babies who did not get born to grow up into criminals.

It's easy to misunderstand statistics, and easier still to twist a statistical conclusion to fit an agenda.

None of this, of course, addresses the root problem, poverty, but that isn't the job of statistics. Statistics measure what is, not what could or should be. They are measurements of observations.

Freakonomics, the book, also addressed the fact that there is a tremendous amount of crime, in fact the majority, that is not affected by mothers aborting unwanted children, but that people fear street crime and tend not to perceive white-collar crime as a problem.

Levitt may indeed be a free-market neoliberal freak, but I don't think the racism charge is appropriate or accurate, and I suspect that Levine has some kind of personal vendetta against Leavitt, because his vitriol is remarkably overarching and widespread given a target who is, in the grand scheme of foul business shit that's going on, inconsequential.

[Cramulus]

I'm reading through some of these S.H.A.M.E. profiles and they seem very nitpicky.

stuff like -- In the 1970s, Arianna Huffington was "involved" with somebody who idolized hitler and owned many rolls royces. He was arrested!

Or this hit piece on Malcom Gladwell being a shill for Phillip Morris. The shame project published an e-mail exchange with Gladwell where it looked like he explained himself pretty well, but they are sticking to their guns. The writer doesn't speak to his conclusions, just to which team enjoyed gladwell's papers most.

Some of these bullet points are very on-target and sketchy, but I think they are going out of their way to cherry pick. Huh, this is put together by nsfw corp? hmmmm weird, need to read more

[Junkenstein]

Alright, I may have been a little strong on the racism charge.

However, the consistent advocacy for shittier conditions for a populace that is largely of one race surely is worth a look.

It's not like he can claim ignorance of the statistics, so I'd suggest, on at least some subconcious level that he his not completly clean on this front. I've got more pushing me towards racist than not I guess.

[Doktor Howl]

If he advocates private prisons, then I don't care if he's a racist.

Because he really can't sink any lower.

[Junkenstein]

I'm reading through some of these S.H.A.M.E. profiles and they seem very nitpicky.

stuff like -- In the 1970s, Arianna Huffington was "involved" with somebody who idolized hitler and owned many rolls royces. He was arrested!

Or this hit piece on Malcom Gladwell being a shill for Phillip Morris. The shame project published an e-mail exchange with Gladwell where it looked like he explained himself pretty well, but they are sticking to their guns. The writer doesn't speak to his conclusions, just to which team enjoyed gladwell's papers most.

Some of these bullet points are very on-target and sketchy, but I think they are going out of their way to cherry pick. Huh, this is put together by nsfw corp? hmmmm weird, need to read more

I'd encourage a good look. I've found the reporting to be pretty solid. I remember it was Cain who put me on to these so he's probably the best chap to say anything about this.

[Cain]

The eXiled "style" can take some getting used to.  You gotta remember - these are the people who put detailed expositions of Russian political corruption next to pieces where they phoned the Russian prime minister posing as "Mr Hamamoto" of the Japanese Embassy, talking about Godzilla and asking where to get the best sushi in Moscow.

The way of writing is meant to be in opposition to the sterilised language of "serious" reporting by "serious" newspapers, which typically have a bad track record at actual, you know, reporting and stuff.  So, the insults, the sometimes strange focus on possibly irrelevant minor details which serve little except to add colour to a piece are all part of that.